We're professional arguers. Not only can we argue about anything. We can argue either side. | | | | Dave Chappelle at his finest making you cringe and laugh in the same breath in "Sticks & Stones"
(Netflix) | | | | |  | “We're professional arguers. Not only can we argue about anything. We can argue either side.”
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| | rantnrave:// I really like getting up early and doing solo breakfast and just thinking. My time. No one around. Excited to reboot REDEF after much time off. Missed it and you. Upcoming "rantnrave" topics here. Zoom in. Any suggestions?... When you scan the news on social media or overhear from someone else what someone said you can get the wrong idea. I'm touchy and emotional since much of the country has gone mean. I can't even watch my dystopian dramas like BLACK MIRROR, HANDMAID'S TALE, WESTWORLD as easily as I used to. Why? The world is catching up or surpassing dystopian qualities. In recent years, I turn to comedy. HOWARD STERN every day (since I was 15). JUDD APATOW. ADAM MCKAY. That genre. DAVID MANDEL's team on VEEP. Politics yes, but they kept it smart and fresh in a time when real-life political absurdity was beyond comprehension. Comedians too. Love SEBASTIAN MANISCALCO. His bit on "parent pricing" had me rolling. But still, I can react to what I didn't see or hear in the wrong way. The interwebs start blowing up about DAVE CHAPELLE's new NETFLIX special. "STICKS & STONES". You know the age-old saying, "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me." And yet, if I'm honest, with my empathy and heart, words were beginning to hurt me. My friend, ALFRED SPELLMAN says the special is reminiscent of the best RICHARD PRYOR. But I'm hearing he's taking some uncomfortable stances on MICHAEL JACKSON's accusers. Abortion. Gun control. My beloved ANTHONY BOURDAIN. LGBTQ. LOUIS C.K. and more. So, oh f**k. Not my fav comedian Chappelle! But Dave wasn't the problem. I was. You have to see and hear and most of all, think before you judge. I ran into one of my favorite actors on Saturday night, GRIFFIN DUNNE. If you've never seen MARTIN SCORSESE's "AFTER HOURS". Get it now. I loved it as a child. Had the poster on my wall. He said Chappelle was remarkable. And for all the reasons I was worried. He was right. And I was reminded that it's comedy. Comedy makes fun of people. Sometimes stereotypes. Comedy offends. Comedy antagonizes. Comedy provokes. There is no "too soon" in comedy. Nothing is off-limits in comedy. Comedy makes you laugh. Comedy lets things in you may reject at first. You can get away with more in comedy. Comedy makes you think. In the EDDIE MURPHY episode of JERRY SEINFELD's "COMEDIANS IN CARS GETTING COFFEE", Jerry says of comedians: “What people don’t understand about us is there’s nothing that’s not funny to us. Nothing. All this careful thing that… that’s just for the audience and the public. Amongst ourselves, we don’t care about anything.” If you watch it with that in mind. And frankly, even without, Dave's show is remarkable. Netflix's TED SARANDOS wrote to me, "Very proud of Dave. Comedy is about pushing the edges of language and ideas. When we can not laugh at ourselves we are doomed. Comedians tell jokes and Dave does that like no other." Yes! Chappelle is a national treasure. And like the greatest truthtellers, he's opened up the conversation to another level. Run and watch. Happy Birthday to DANA SETTLE, ABIGAIL KLEM, HOSAIN RAHMAN, JEREMIAH ZINN, and TOBY GUNDERSON. | | | - Jason Hirschhorn, curator |
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 | POLITICO Magazine |
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| Mellody Hobson (President, Ariel Investments) sits down with Jason Hirschhorn to discuss the influences and mentors over her career; the role of a board member in good times and in crisis; addressing diversity in businesses, community and content; and the future of media. | | |
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 | The Ringer |
| From ‘The Foot Fist Way’ to ‘Eastbound & Down’ and ‘Vice Principals,’ we’ve been watching the actor flex for a decade as the heroic antihero. But now he’s flexing for real, flaunting actual range on HBO’s darkly rich ‘The Righteous Gemstones.’ | | |
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 | The Hustle |
| Yes, $7 popcorn is a ripoff. But it’s also the lifeblood of most movie theaters’ business model. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| Frank Olson died in 1953, but, because of clandestine US government experiments, it took decades for his family to get closer to the truth. | | |
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 | The Daily Beast |
| In a candid interview with Lloyd Grove, Billy Bush opens up about #MeToo, Al Franken, Donald Trump, his ‘suicidal thoughts’ after being fired by NBC—and his return to TV. | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| Spotify and Amazon are battling the Copyright Royalty Board over streaming royalty rates. But if Apple had its way, things could have been very different. | | |
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 | Quanta Magazine |
| Since the 1970s, physicists have described black holes using borrowed versions of the laws of thermodynamics. But are black holes really thermodynamic systems? | | |
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 | The Ezra Klein Show |
| “The Constitution must be adapted to the problems of each generation,” writes Erwin Chemerisnky, “we are not living in the world of 1787 and should not pretend that the choices for that time can guide ours today.” Does that sentence read to you as obvious or offensive? | | |
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 | Medium |
| Why podcasting may have minted its first billionaire, subscription podcasting is the next great business model, and how to join the revolution. | | |
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| | | in making me insufferable |
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 | BuzzFeed News |
| A community of Orthodox Jews prospers by selling products on Amazon -- and keeping one foot in modernity and one foot out. | | |
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 | TED Talks |
| Journalist Andrew Marantz spent three years embedded in the world of internet trolls and social media propagandists, seeking out the people who are propelling fringe talking points into the heart of conversation online and trying to understand how they're making their ideas spread. | | |
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 | Vox |
| The people who built Etsy dreamed of remaking commerce with their bare hands. Fifteen years later, its sellers are being asked to compete with Amazon. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| A country struggling with deeply rooted inequality need not continue an affirmative action program for successful families. | | |
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 | VentureBeat |
| In many ways, NASCAR feels like a good fit for esports. The views from the cockpit of a race car can be thrilling. It's fast, and and mayhem can happen any time cars bunch up on the track. | | |
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 | The Independent |
| 'I’ve always had somehow a guilty conscience.' | | |
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 | Andreessen Horowitz |
| One sunny afternoon this April, a Chinese teenager nicknamed Gallen was backpacking through Bali, hunting for things to do. But he didn't turn to TripAdvisor for crowd-sourced suggestions (too time consuming) or scroll through Instagram for local geotags (too imprecise). | | |
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 | Washingtonian |
| In the tunnels beneath a placid suburban home, an angel investor turned into an angel of doom. | | |
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 | GeekWire |
| Microsoft President Brad Smith has a light-up globe, a neon blue miniature likeness of Earth, spinning on his desk inside the company's Redmond headquarters. When we sat down with him this week, he noticed something wrong with it. | | |
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 | CNN Reliable Sources |
| The Committee to Protect Journalists is out with a new report showing the pervasiveness of online harassment, and the unique risks facing female reporters. Courtney Radsch tells Brian Stelter that newsrooms need "to take this issue seriously" and "address this proactively with their reporters, both staff and freelance." | | |
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 | VICE |
| You gave them your data in exchange for a driver’s license. DMVs are making tens of millions of dollars selling it, documents obtained by Motherboard show. | | |
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 | The Washington Post |
| September 6 at 12:54 PM Fatana Elyasi should have been shopping for her wedding dress. Instead, she was weeping over her fiance's grave in a cemetery close to her home in western Kabul. It was one of seven in a row her neighbors had dug for each member of her family killed at her cousin's wedding two nights before. | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | | | Neil Giraldo's guitar is like a musical assault. Love it. |
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